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Murray-Darling goals on water quality 'aspirational'

David Wroe and Tom Arup

The new draft plan for the Murray-Darling basin faces criticism. Photo: Darren Seiler

THE amount of water set aside to boost the health of the ailing Murray-Darling basin could be slashed by hundreds of gigalitres, a draft plan obtained by The Saturday Age shows.

The plan also appears to relax targets on water quality and salinity in the Murray-Darling basin, on which 3.4 million Australians depend for their drinking water, describing the targets merely as ''aspirational'' rather than mandatory.

Documents obtained by the environmental group Friends of the Earth show that the Victorian and NSW governments both asked the independent Murray-Darling Basin Authority to ease these requirements.

Friends of the Earth Murray-Darling campaigner Jonathan La Nauze said the plan's description of water quality and salinity targets as being merely ''aspirational'' was ''cold comfort for the 3.4 million people who rely on the basin for their water''.

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''Upstream states who wash 2 million tonnes of salt into the river each year will only 'aspire' to leave South Australia enough water to flush it out the mouth,'' he said.

The long-awaited draft plan to improve the environmental health of the basin will be released on November 28 but has been leaked to media outlets including The Saturday Age.

The draft plan confirms that the authority - which was established to oversee management of the basin, in an effort to end decades of bickering between the states - is recommending that an extra 2800 gigalitres of water be reserved to improve flows through the river system.

But in an apparent effort to appease irrigators, some of whom burnt copies of an earlier guide to the draft plan because it recommended an even larger environmental boost, the authority now says the 2800 figure ''can be reduced significantly - perhaps in the order of hundreds of gigalitres'' if monitoring shows environmental gains can be made with less water.

The legislative instrument that would enact the plan states that the amount of water set aside for the environment could also go up when the plan is reviewed in 2015, though the authority pushed only the prospect of a cut in its ''plain-English summary'' of the plan. Any changes would need to be backed by both houses of parliament.

Victorian Water Minister Peter Walsh was furious about the leaks, for which he blamed the authority's chairman, Craig Knowles, accusing him of playing a ''cunning political game'' by drip-feeding information to avoid outrage by irrigators on the plan's official release.

Tom Chesson, chief executive of the National Irrigators Council, said he doubted the amount of water taken for environmental use would ever be reduced and criticised the draft plan for failing to ''properly explain how the figure of 2800 was derived, given they do not know how, when, why or where they want to use that water''.

The authority has also removed a climate change allowance of a reduction of available surface water of 3 per cent, which was included in last year's guide to the basin plan. A spokeswoman for the authority said the climate change allowance would instead be included in state water resourcing plans.

The plan acknowledges that taking water away from irrigation would hurt some smaller rural communities in dairy farming areas in the Goulburn, including the towns of Stanhope and Strathmerton, and also the Victorian Murray region.